Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday May 13, 2012 @10:13AM
from the like-y'-do dept.

joabj writes "Following up on experiments of running Internet Protocol(IP)-based networks with carrier pigeons or bongos, UofC grad student R. Stuart Geiger has demonstrated that it is possible to transmit simple ping requests across two computers using people playing xylophones. Throughput is roughly 1 baud, when the participants don't make any mistakes, or get bored and wander off. The OSI encapsulated model of networking makes this project doable, allowing humans to be inserted at Layer 1, the physical layer. Vint Cerf wasn't kidding when he used to say, 'IP on Everything.'"

In the public grade schools in Hawaii, the class will share about four textbooks on any given subject, and the state mandates and actually teaches toward state tests with state lesson plans and quizzes that are frequently wrong. They mark the kids as wrong when they get things right, and then tell them "you were right but I have to mark it lower because the state's answer is X."

When I visited the Miraikan Museum in Odaiba, Toyko, back in ~2005 they had a mechanical IP network that routed 2 byte messages of black and white wooden balls over rails and Archimedes screws. The first byte was the "IP" address (I think there were 4 or 5 nodes) and the second byte was the message. You set up your message in the staging area of your workstation, then pulled the release lever. The balls would roll down the track past an eye that would read the colors and various gates would be opened/clo

Not quite. In IPv4, both the network layer (IP) and transport layer (TCP) detect transmission errors via checksums. In IPv6, the network layer does not actually detect errors at all (I believe this is so in order to speed up routers by not having them calculate checksums). There's only the TCP checksum and whatever link-layer error detection you have protecting you from corrupted packets.

That is not correct. The IP header does have a checksum, but it covers only the header itself. Corrupted data would not be detected by the IP checksum. TCP has a checksum that covers the TCP header, all the payload data, and a few important fields of the IP header (such as source and destination IP).

In IPv6, the network layer does not actually detect errors at all (I believe this is so in order to speed u

Right. There are commonly error checking at the link layer below IP as well as in the transport layer on top of IP. And both of them will cover the IP header. It was considered redundant to have three separate layers compute checksums of the IP header, thus it was removed. It never covered anything but the header itself.

Also, there is something important to be said about link-layer error detection: it is not end-to-end. If corruption occurs while the packet is being handled by a router (as opposed to while

Also, there is something important to be said about link-layer error detection: it is not end-to-end. If corruption occurs while the packet is being handled by a router (as opposed to while it is traversing a link), the link-layer won't be able to detect it.

Very true. I have gotten into some verbal fights over that in the past with people insisting their error checking was good enough, and they didn't want to support the same kind of error checking other people were using. I kept pointing out, that the it w

Really they didn't implement IP-over-xylophone -- you cannot, because there is no provision in the IP standard for framing between packets. They implemented some as-yet-undisclosed link layer protocol, and then ran IP over it. They could just as easily have run DECNET. Since they gave no details of the link layer protocol, we don't know if it had checksum support.

Any layer may be implemented. The physical layer being a man and his xylophone, layer 2 could be a check that the notes are the correct ones.
Layer 3, IP, needs a minimum of 160 bits for the header... and the guys need to be good in arithmetic calculation to provide an accurate checksum!
And why not a router at that layer, two men, one listens to the last xylophone and the other one translates to a piano in the next room... while there could be some networks interferences:-)

i.e. yoo see burr clee, and even that is incorrect, as the town and the school where named after Bishop Berkeley of "if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" fame. His name is pronounced BAR clee.

Dude, why did you post anonymous. You would have had a great moderation war.

Those who see the humor (and fact) in wrote you wrote would mod you up.
Those see Spielberg as a deity and will do anything to appease him, and mod you down.
Those who the virgin comment hits just a little too close to home would mod you down.

My gut instinct is that you would have had at least a couple dozen moderations, and landed at a nice solid "+4 troll"

And so did many other people to multiplex telegraph signals over precious telegraph lines. In fact generalizations of these techniques lead to the phonograph and telephone. Read Randall Stross Edison biography for details. He is a Silicon valley historian.

1 baud seems quite slow. Using the different notes to code diffent byte values would allow you to transmit data quite quickly. If you have 8 diffferent notes, then 2 consecutive notes can do 1.6 million different combinations. That's equivalent to 3 bytes. 2 notes could easily be played in 1 second rso 3 baud would be simple. Bring it up to 32 keys and the baud rate could go up quite highroad. You just have to encode it properly.

The baud rate is insignificant of throughput, it's not clear why it was even mentioned, especially in relation to throughput. Each note encodes 4 bits (a hex digit), so although it does run at 1 baud, the system runs at 4 bps.

1 baud means one symbol per second, not one bit per second. If there are only two symbols in the alphabet (for example two notes), then 1 baud results in 1bps, but if there are more symbols, the bitrate can be higher.

And for those who slept in biology, xylem tissue transports water and dissolved nutrients, in a tree it is the wood. The word comes from the Greek xylon, which means wood. So a xylophone must be wooden.

Originally xylophones were all wooden, and the expensive ones still are, but many are made of synthetic material now.

As a band director that teaches percussion it drives me nuts when people call a Glockenspiel (or bell set) a xylophone. I think it's caused by some of the toys that are available for little kids that are mislabeled.

With today's DSP technology, FFT algorithms, and a bank of solenoids, two computers could, in theory, transmit data via xylophones a LOT faster than one baud!

FFT analysis on the receiving ends determines which notes are being played and when, even simultaneously. By using notes unique to each machine, both can be playing and receiving simultaneously. It would be quite noisy, but would definitely work.

It would also be a good idea to "damp" the chimes, to dramatically reduce the audio decay rate. This would a

"The OSI encapsulated model of networking makes this project doable". The OSI model never made anything doable. Encapsulation was invented long before OSI came along and the seven layers never had any impact on the basic Internet protocols. The idea of "frameworks" is about as close as anyone got to anything like the OSI seven-layer cake which has always been an abomination and was never responsible for the development of anything.

Internet Protocol over Xylophone Players (IPoXP) situates humans at the lowest layers of the Internet. Read the full paper at http://www.stuartgeiger.com/ipoxp.pdf [stuartgeiger.com]. A project by R. Stuart Geiger, Yoon Jeong, and Emily Manders at the University of California, Berkeley. Presented at alt.CHI 2012.

A lot of people who've been working with electronic computers all their life intuitively assume that electrical computers are the only way to go, but there are other (albeit mostly currently impracticable) ways to automate binary math.
-You can make a computer that uses water pressure instead of voltage- all the logic gates used in electronics can be built with copper pipe.
-You could theoretically build a fully optical computer, with fibers, mirrors, beam splitters, etc (this I've been mulling over in my

As a followon to my rfc1149 and rfc2549, I considered doing IP over black holes: if you carefully control matter being dropped into a black hole, you can modulate the huge X-ray emissions as the matter is ripped apart. This would be detectable over huge distances.